Sometimes for an intellectual project to move forward, a whole body of study has to be given a proper name. In this post I intend to coin a new term, The YMCA Consensus.

In 2011 David Chapman wrote a fantastic summary of the conflicts in modern Buddhism in which he coined the term Consensus Buddhism. His work is a powerful investigation of the way religion and culture interact, and how East meets West. It is essential reading for people interested in the history, dissemination and evolution of martial arts. 

The problem I was confronting...

How did I become a rooting skeptic? Twenty years ago I was giving private Northern Shaolin lessons to a high school football player. (His father happened to be on the public school board of one of the wealthiest school districts in the USA, so from a business point of view this was a high pressure gig.) The student had been training with me for a couple of months and I decided to work on rooting skills with him. The method I chose came from the Xingyi taught by Kumar Frantzis. It involved a progression of challenges where the two of us hold opposite ends of a staff and root against each other. The progressions involve stepping and twisting, opening and closing, bending and straightening. Frantzis had instructed that these exercises should be done until both people's root is so good that the staff breaks. Normally it takes a lot of practice to get that good.

What are muscles for? And what do they actually do? Let's dispense with the conventional explanation first. Muscles are for strength. Perhaps, but that explanation isn't useful. We don't really need more strength. Okay, everyone can invent a situation where more strength would be handy, but for every situation we can also invent a work-around or a way to adapt without increasing strength. I'm not anti-strength here, we should all try to make each other stronger, smarter, richer and better looking.  I'm just saying it isn't a need. Being normal isn't a deficiency. Anyway, strength is relative. If you are doing athletic competition against people in your weight class, in most situations more muscle mass is an advantage. But that is a small part of the martial arts world. And to the contrary, it is the minimum promise of most martial arts classes that skill and training can confer more advantage than strength alone.

So if muscles aren't for strength what are they? What do they do? 

Check out this funny video that totally ripped my ideas...

We are capable of both conscious rebalancing and unconscious rebalancing. To stand on two feet requires constant rebalancing. In fighting, I always want to be doing at least these four things: targeting vulnerable areas, improving my position, compromising my opponent's structure, and unbalancing my opponent. Meanwhile, I want to keep my opponent rebalancing unconsciously.

My friend Vajra is teaching a workshop in Boulder worth checking out. He has unique experience with violence, he was the lead inspector for San Francisco's Entertainment Commission which which put him in daily contact with social violence and gang violence hot-spots. He co-founded the 4 Rings Collective with Robert Lee in 2014.

Why am I so anti-fajin?

Fajin is defined here as shoving, but it is using magic tricks to shove, so we might call it competitive-deceptive shoving, or technically-superior shoving.

If you do it entirely without uprooting it is just a tackle, it's physics, mass times velocity squared (MV2). Nothing wrong with that.

If you shove someone from behind by surprise, most people will stumble a few feet and recover. This is an amazing phenomena. Why is this? Why are humans so incredibly good at instantly regaining balance?

Jing is such a key concept in Chinese martial arts, theater, meditation and religion. I just thought, for fun, I'd post Google Translates instant correlations. 

32 Translations of jing 精

adjective

• fine 精细, 细, 精, 优良, 精美, 良好
• refined 精制, 精, 优雅, 文雅, 优美, 彬
• precise 精确, 准确, 确切, 精, 过份周到的, 过份注意的

Applications Rant.

I teach applications. Applications are all about capturing a feeling. A feeling of moving through space, of getting a hold, of clearing, catching, spinning, or tipping. The point of an application is to get a feeling, and then find that feeling again spontaneously in some kind of rough-housing game. 

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